This May, the PCMA Seminar will host a talk by Dr. Micaela Sinibaldi: “The pottery of Southern Transjordan: a methodology of research for Islamic-period handmade pottery and the case-study of Petra”
Abstract: “The Late Petra Project aims at reconstructing the history of the Islamic period in the Petra valley and region. Through a detailed study of ceramics, the project has now demonstrated that there were no significant chronological gaps in the occupation of the area during the Islamic period and therefore, contrarily to what has been assumed in the past, that the region was never completely abandoned. The study has therefore also revealed that, contrary to some former assumptions, the analysis of handmade ceramics, which constitutes the vast majority of Islamic-period ceramics in Southern Transjordan and other areas of the Bilād al-Shām, has an important potential in this region for discerning chronology and therefore the diachronic study of settlement patterns through the Islamic period.
At the origin of the misunderstanding of the complete abandonment of Petra in Jordan are the intense aspects of longevity of Islamic-period pottery and the fact that a study of its chronology had never been attempted on the basis of several sites. This project is based on the study of ceramics from excavations and surveys with several international archaeological teams in Petra. The first step was the creation of a new method of analysis based on detected variations, coexisting with elements of longevity, reflecting chronologically diagnostic aspects. The creation of a basic local ceramic chronology has allowed proposing a chronological frame for the several excavated sites analyzed and, in turn, for some of the sites recorded from archaeological surveys. Preliminary conclusions include the significance of settlement in Petra during the Mamluk period, and of the connections with the Hajj road for the introduction of imports into Petra from other areas of the Bilād al-Shām, as well as observations on the degree of regionalism of handmade pottery in Southern Transjordan.”
The seminar will be held on Thursday, 26th May at 11.30 am CET on Zoom. To obtain a link, please write to the PCMA UW office: pcma@uw.edu.pl